Interrogating how gender, race, sexuality, and transnational
issues complexly intersect with science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) is not a new project for feminists. Yet each
of the recent works reviewed here offer productive,
interdisciplinary additions to the intricate landscape of these
intersections, presenting valuable perspectives on the mutually
transformative links between gender-based inquiry and STEM issues
that lie at the heart of feminist science studies.

Jill M. Bystydzienski and Sharon R. Bird’s Removing
Barriers: Women in Academic Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics is a particularly useful and comprehensive
collection that examines the persistence and seeming intractability
of the under-representation of women in academic STEM areas. What
makes this collection especially effective is the careful and
convincing theoretical perspective by which it is informed. At the
very center of Bystydzienski and Bird’s approach is the quite
explicit rejection of more traditional approaches to understanding
and “fixing” the problem of the underrepresentation of women in
academic STEM areas. Specifically, the authors refuse to accept
what they describe as “interventions that construe women as ‘the
problem’ in need of change” and which primarily focus on helping
individual women adjust to doing science or acquiring skills they
appear to lack (4). Similarly, the editors challenge the simplicity
of the popular “pipeline” theory, noting that while the image of
women progressively falling away from STEM careers is an apt one,
the leaky pipeline model also fails to critique adequately the
deeply masculinist cultural and structural barriers that are
fundamentally embedded in science and engineering fields.

This clear-headed approach to the problems of women and STEM
success/retention allows the seventeen essays in this collection to
grapple effectively with multifaceted levels of inquiry and
analysis while avoiding any of the randomness or disjuncture that
often plague such distinctly ambitious projects. Bystydzienski and
Bird divide the work into four sections: historical issues
concerning women in STEM, institutional and cultural barriers,
feminist science studies, and ideas for remedies and change. The
first section features essays by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, who
analyzes historical patterns concerning gender, science, and
technology in the twentieth-century United States, and Amy Sue Bix,
who specifically addresses the gendered history of engineering
(chapters one and two, respectively). These two essays provide a
valuable framework for the work that follows—work that often
returns to the historical frame the better to explain the
persistent exclusion of women in STEM fields.

Section two foregrounds issues of race and the particular
barriers faced by women of color. This section features Sally
Hanson’s study of issues faced by African American women in science
fields (chapter six) and Josephine Beoku-Betts’ discussion of
issues encountered by African women who travel to “the West”
(specifically the United States, Canada or Europe) to continue or
complete STEM graduate work (chapter seven). Cogent analyses of the
configurations and stubborn tenacity of cultural and structural
barriers—lack of practical and abstract support, effective and
ineffective pedagogical approaches, overt and covert
discrimination, constricted access to resources, and limited
opportunities for collaboration in research and grant-writing—make
this section relevant to all feminist educators attempting to
address the under-representation of women of color in STEM fields.
Especially useful in this context is Sue V. Rosser’s “Using POWRE
to ADVANCE: Institutional Barriers Identified by Women Scientists
and Engineers” (chapter three) which usefully outlays the specific
obstacles most frequently faced by women in STEM. Molly J. Dingle’s
chapter on the effects of the gendered atmosphere of the college
science classroom and its subsequent effects on the
self-perceptions of both female and male students is quite
illuminating, as well (chapter eight).

Section three moves the collection towards a direct engagement
with “science content” in order to reveal the assumptions and
biases that permeate the methodologies of doing science. Of course,
feminists interested in science studies and/or STEM-related issues
have been dismantling the idea of scientific objectivity and
debunking science as a “value free” enterprise for decades. This
section offers excellent examples of precisely how the critique of
supposed neutrality sheds light on the particular challenges faced
women by in STEM. Carla Fehr, for example, points out the
limitations of scientific reductionism as a constrictive...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.